The Death Penalty Is Racist: Now Is the Perfect Time to Abolish It Once and For All

Jessica S. Henry
7 min readJul 12, 2020

Julius Jones has spent the last 20 years on Oklahoma’s death row for a murder he has always said he didn’t commit.

It’s stories like his that should make us put an end to the death penalty.

In the fall of 1998, Jones was a freshman engineering student at the University of Oklahoma on a presidential scholarship. By the summer of 1999, Jones was in custody for the murder of 45-year-old Paul Howell, a businessman and father shot dead during a carjacking.

Jessica S. Henry

Criminal Justice Reform/Prof/Fmr public defender. Blog@ www.jessicahenryjustice.com. au:Smoke but No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened